World Views | Black Friday is not dead; it may be getting stronger

Now that we’ve all eaten plenty of turkey and fallen asleep on the couch watching football, it’s time for yet another Thanksgiving weekend tradition: declaring Black Friday dead.

This has been a common theme in analysis and media reports about retail’s annual deal extravaganza for years now. 

As online shopping grows, there’s less incentive to wait outside in the cold – in a line that might be hundreds of people deep – to get a good price on a giant television. You no longer need to shop on Black Friday to get a promotional price, as retailers now blare the discount siren throughout November and December.

And recent years have brought a steady stream of stories about dying malls and store bankruptcies piling up into a “retail apocalypse.” If the whole industry is in free fall, the logic goes, then surely the Black Friday tradition is going down with it.

But if I were a retailer, I would tune out the funeral dirges being played for Black Friday and listen instead to what I assume your sales numbers are telling you: The occasion is still critically important. And in at least one way, it might be getting even more important.

Let’s start with the big picture: According to a survey by the National Retail Federation, roughly 115 million Americans planned to shop on Black Friday this year. And about 32 million plan to shop on Thanksgiving Day, when big-name players such as Best Buy Co. Inc. and Macy’s Inc. are set to open their doors for their Black Friday sales. 

Sorry, but if tens of millions of people plan to do something, then it’s hard for me to pronounce said activity dead.  And shoppers indeed have good reason to pull out their wallets.

It’s true you can nab some kind of discount throughout much of the holiday run-up. But research from Adobe Digital Insights finds that the best prices of the season for online shoppers across a variety of categories are likely to be found on the Black Friday weekend.

As long as retailers keep encouraging Black Friday shopping with such pricing patterns, legions of shoppers will keep braving the crowds or filling up their digital shopping carts during this event. 

That brings me to what I think is a particularly important aspect of Black Friday’s transformation. In the online channel, as you might expect, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are easily the biggest spending days of the season.  

But what’s noteworthy is that these days are also projected to be the fastest-growing of the season.

As Tamara Gaffney, a senior director at Adobe Digital Insights, points out, it is remarkable that sales on these days are expected to see such strong growth from an already massive base.

In other words, in the online channel, spending is only getting more concentrated on these major deals events. 

So, in a way, the stakes are just getting higher for retailers to get these sales right. That means making sure their websites don’t slow or crash under the pressure of heavier traffic. And it means making sure they’re not out of stock in key items and that supply chains are ready to quickly fulfill a crush of orders.

All of this makes it hard for me to join in the chorus of people that completely write off Black Friday. The bonanza is surely different than it was back in its ‘90s and early 2000s glory days, when you regularly saw scenes on the local news that brought to mind the wildebeest stampede in “The Lion King.”

The event is less store-centric now, and the deals are spread over longer stretches of time. But it is still a monster sales occasion and a key opportunity to build brand affinity and loyalty with shoppers. In this highly competitive retailing environment, that’s something big chains can ill afford to squander.  Sarah Halzack, Bloomberg

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